new year's resolution

it's been a busy December, and i only just realized that tomorrow i will wake to a new decade. this is as arbitrary as it is irrelevant, but it gave me a moment to pause and recall the stream of consciousness that was my life on the night of December 31, 1999:

prophecy
tonight a book will end
pages yet to be written
empty lines crying to be filled
inked scarred marked barred
from realizing what they might mean
left blank at author's request
a superstitious fool
-ish to believe in romance
brave enough to-
finish a sentence without words
barreling forward with such force
one step left
leaving the pages be
enjoy their innocence
their ignorance of a world that knows
slashes and lines and an occasional curve
but never the beauty of the written word
unwritten unformed
unbound by the confines of pen
of ink of a writer's treacherous hand
betraying the feeling to thought
and thought to word
and word to ink
and ink to paper
paper to pad
pad to bag
until it's
reduced
to
-
no words
no worse

two days later i left for Paris, and two weeks after that i returned to Manhattan. by the end of the month, i had fallen asleep on a flight to Gainesville and dreamed about the saddest girl in the world...

but that point is yet to come.

dancer in the dark

over the holidays, my yin and i watched Dancer in the Dark while staying at her mother's house. for me, it was a night of vicarious nostalgia - sleeping in her old room, watching movies on a VCR, and eating cheese pizza from the neighborhood parlor of her childhood.

but this is beside the point.

the point is that i watched van Trier's Dogville a number of years ago, during a hazy return to my own (approximate) hometown. i remember being disturbed even through the anesthesia, and i wondered if Björk's star persona would overpower the film -

thankfully this was not the case.

in fact her presence only augmented the films affect, contributing an extratextual surreality to the already absurd juxtaposition of musical numbers with morose narrative tone. topping it off was the use of hand-held digital cameras, which washed out the whole film to create a powerfully bleak visual aesthetic.

i felt as if the monotony and sunlessness of Selma's impending blindness were my own, and the lack of color left tears in my yin's eyes as she spoke:

"it makes me cry every time i see it... i forget."

children's songs for adults

it all started a little more than a month ago, when my yin purchased tickets for us to see Phish in Miami. i have already ruminated on my complicated relationship with the band, and last night only served to confirm much of what i have long suspected...

we arrived after 5pm, parked, and made our way to "the lot," which i can only describe as a mix between a swap meet, tailgate, and open air drug market. there are bean burritos and "goo balls," cheap pizza and undecipherable meats on sticks. there are innumerable sketchy characters pacing about, many looking for their sister "Molly," and my favorite is a guy mumbling under his breath as he traverses the crowds. i listen closely, but even after he passes a second time, i'm unable to tell if he's selling "doses" or "dosas."

(mmmm... dosas)

there is an RV with a sign that reads "Please Come In" and we decide to take them up on it. a short girl wearing a doo-rag and a half-baked, made-up name tells us 18 people live in this automotive monstrosity. she is very polite, and i ask her about the commune to which she belongs. he answer is interesting, but cryptic, and i leave with the understanding that her community is somewhere between neo-hippie bohemian and Jews for Jesus Freaktopia.

eventually, after a bean burrito, we make our way inside the arena to our very good seats in the fourth row. i have not been in an arena since the dismal days of 2001, when i left a bad situation in North Carolina for a worse situation in New Jersey, but this is beside the point.

[shift tense]

the point is that my yin spies La Cienega, who jumps across the seats and kisses us both, tasting of liquor and reeking of patchouli. i have not seen her in more than a year, and other than sporadic missed phone calls, we have had no communication since she left for the West. it is a surreal moment, and there is some odd karmic bond connecting the three of us.

once upon a time, La Cienega was my yin's cheerleading coach, and i remember a night in 2007 when i still fawned over her, enlisted my yin's help in trying to persuade her that the gap between our ages was not to vast. the four of us - La Cienega, my yin, my yin's future ex, and myself - had gone to a kirtan that night, and returned to a small condo just off the ocean still vibrating. we drank tea and shared stories, and in many ways that magical night seems a lifetime ago.

(yet)

last night the three of us stood there in the 4th row embracing once more, and my yin told La Cienega how we had spoken of her earlier in "the lot" - somehow we knew we would see her.

La Cienega just smiled her indescribable smile, batted her bottomless eyes, and told us that she felt blessed to know we were together. she retreated once more into the crowd, and the lights dimmed to start the show...

Broken Embraces

last year Jache and i spent Christmas together pretending to be Jewish, eating Chinese food and watching an especially bad Tom Cruise film. (apparently) the experiment tapped into a far stronger mojo than we had anticipated, because two nights ago i found myself at the movies with both he and my yin - this time watching an especially good Almodóvar film - in the shadow of a chuppah.

but this is beside the point.

the point is that my last encounter with the man from La Mancha (not to be confused with the other man from La Mancha) found me retching and left me poetic, and i walked into the theater at 9:40pm with high expectations - i was not disappointed.

[lapse 2:15:00]

Jache asked me what i thought of the film's motifs and meanings, and i heard myself regurgitating just as i did fifteen months ago about Volver. this time, however, my viewpoint was skewed neither by nausea not endorphins. i told him

(approximately):

the film was textured darkness, wonderful and nearly noir, full of drugs and sex and film and film and film. it wass like watching a sculpture built by a blind clocksmith, and it brought up for me the problematic nature of reliance upon artifacts for the reinforcement of memory. how much of what we remember is based on nothing more than photographs and journals?

and

if one were to lose his sight (as does the film's protagonist), she would be left only with memory, a memory falling forever further from the experience of living.

as the shutters close, what remains?

obsevation(of)reflection(on)the(shortest day of the)year

two days ago my yin and i observed the solstice, and this year's ritual was surrounded by substantially less drama than that of last December. our ceremony included frankincense and mantra, prayer and a makeshift cup of holy water, and afterward we traveled west to a belated Chanukah dinner. latkes and drunkenness ensued, and i left some what drained.

but this is beside the point.

the point is that this year is the first time i celebrated with another person, and it was amazing to sit in front of our altar, rearranging its constituent parts into something that held meaning for both of us. it's simpler now, less messy, less rigidly symmetrical, and i like to believe that the constellation which emerged somehow foretells the year that lie ahead.

time will tell.

be careful what you ask for... (happy solstice)

the past couple of years, i've been celebrating the winter solstice. the days leading up to it are a time of reflection, and being a former pack rat (a hoarder my brother would say), i make it a point to get rid of things that are no longer serving me. i see it as a cleansing ritual in preparation for the blessings that lie ahead in the coming year. this is not beside the point.

last night i finished work around 2am, after helping demolish a makeshift ice rink in the theater where i work. it was an all-around impressive display of smashing, shoveling, and dumping, and by the time i left i was looking forward to a hot shower to wash away the lingering traces of glycol.

i walked up the staircase of the parking garage, unlocked my car, and opened the door to find things oddly askew. it wasn't anything specific, and i momentarily dismissed my feeling as fatigue. opening the console, however, i found my sense of unease rewarded.

my iPod and tape adapter were missing, and after double-checking my backpack, i looked once more at the interior of my vehicle - the glove box was open, small bits of paper were spread about, and the compact discs i keep in the door packet were gone. i thought back to the second half of the second show, and the car alarm we heard in the background over our headsets. it sounded familiar, like an eight year old echo from New Jersey.

once upon a time, i was more naughty than nice, and i remember working an interminable run of the Nutcracker for a ballet company based in New Brunswick. the details are not important, but last night i had a flash of that dreary November. it was the coldest winter i ever saw, with overcast days giving way to rain and the aftershock of towers falling.

(i paid no heed, too busy watching the sugar plum fairy to be distracted.)

this morning i took stock of what was missing: two iPods, one blank composition pad, one broken discman, an unknown quantity of scratched cds, and two "green" shopping bags - neither of which were green. left in the car, inexplicably, were a two week-old pair of Ray-Bans as well as the ignition key.

i wondered briefly if the the thief had overlooked it or simply chosen not to steal the vehicle. it doesn't really matter, but something inside tells me it was more likely the latter. even in my naughtiness, i maintained that fundamental sense of compassion that makes us all human, and i know that the thief was merely trying to keep warm in his own freezing Floridian winter. the lesson for me is twofold:

1) karma, although not instant, is gonna get you.

2) happy solstice, be careful what you ask for.

we [clarification]

i watched Rent (the movie version) last night and either:

the bohemian romance of New York is a clever fiction,
a lie we

[Generation X]

tell ourselves in an attempt to grapple with the fact
that we

[Americans]

live in a nation where the indomitable efficiency of
interstates and television has obliterated the
peculiarities of geographic separation. we

[artists]

loathe to believe this, and write musicals and songs
and books

[and blogs]

pretending it isn't so. we

[would-be critics]

watch with a mix of terror, excitement, and
trepidation as a quilt emerges from our collective
musings - a quilt pieced together from pop culture
references, allusion, consumption, cleverity,
pathological irony, and non-historicized personal
experience. we

[the tragic curious]

are left to wonder if it was ever so, or
if it was only a dream we

[the unreformed romantics]

invented in an attempt to keep from
shivering in the night;

the pastiche quilt of post-modernity makes for a poor bedfellow.

OR

i

[the author]

wrote the above in an attempt to distance myself from
the sadness i

[the human]

felt.

sunless

[a reaction, delayed, two months and counting]

i finally watched Sans soleil. less clear than La jetée, but equally amazing, centered in Japan and Africa; a narrator reading letters about time and memory juxtaposed with views and images of ceremony and everyday life...

strange digressions into Vertigo and the making of the film itself. the interplay of the two and the bizarre look at early 1980’s Tokyo – which looks like 2009 Any City, USA – displaced the whole film within time itself, and i felt like i was watching a past window on the future. maybe not the one i'm living in, but a window nonetheless...

by its end, the film left me disembodied. i could not truly feel my hands and yet saw them in lap. i could not connect the image to sight or differentiate between dream and waking. ultimately i missed the final frames and heard only an echo of the voice over. i started to rewind, but instead chose to acknowledge the slippage in time and not wrangle it back in to some familiar continuity...

i went to bed and dreamed and dreamed and dreamed…

family dinner

we pulled up to my brother's house with the clouds filling the valleys and mountains peaking out like small islands in a vast sea of mist and fog. the wind had died down from two days before and the temperature crept into the mid-thirties. my brother and his girlfriend met us outside and the four of us loaded into his car.

my grandmother's home is full of people upon arrival, and we gather in the kitchen just as we did when i was young. there are three grandsons, two daughters, two (future?) daughter-in-laws, one matriarch and my grandfather.

not in the room are one grandson, one daughter, her husband, and seven (past) son-in-laws. these demographics are importantly only in that they speak of what once was, and they echoed the previous day's premonition of new beginnings and nostalgia.

the scene around the table is eerily Hallmark-like. there is a sense of togetherness, a sense of relation, a sense of comfort that goes beyond familial familiarity. i could name the pieces, but not the magical way in which they all fit together.

it is as if all the cosmos conspired, and allowed the grooved dysfunction of habit and personality to recede for the afternoon, giving us a glimpse at what has always been just below the surface.

Asheville is (kinda) like...

we arrive to the odd excitement of a small city tucked away in the mountains - the same mild anticipation that one might feel in Charleston or Manchester or any other micropolis whose charm is measured in coffee cups rather than saucers. there is a Broadway and a parking spot and a lawyer living in a loft across from a gay bar. he greets us with stereotypical clever bitchiness and Ray-Bans.

we go inside and introductions are made. he is just waking from the night before and has a photograph of a half-naked woman staring at the Roman Colosseum on his wall. everything this whole day transpires under overcast skies, and it makes it difficult to tell the time other than some vague notion of lateness. it is a strange mishmash of nostalgia and new beginnings, growing clearer the next day around kitchen tables and half-finished living rooms.

(this is the point.)

the first time i remember going to Asheville was with with my great grandfather, and we visited the Biltmore estate. i recall little other than the bowling alley and him slipping me some wine on the sly.

(this is beside the point).

the point is that i visited Asheville twice as an adult. the first time was in college when i was in a band. we drove four hours (one way) from Chapel Hill to play at a (now defunct) club. as chance would have it, our host gave my yin and i a walking tour of downtown, and i found myself in front of those same large windows once more. a decade had passed, 31 Patton was gone, but the music played on.

the next time was perhaps five years ago, when i was living a past li(f)e and trying to find some kind of ex(c)it(ment). a childhood friend drove [us] down the mountain and i'm uncertain what [we] even did there. i have flashes of a movie theater and music playing in a courtyard, but there is no source material regarding the experience.

(this is inside the point)

today downtown Asheville is all local, all the time, and our journey led us to the skeletal remains of Woolworth's - now reduced to a lunch counter. in the basement hung a piece of artwork that captured all the things i do and do not remember about the Ashevilles i've known:

"The palest ink is better than the best memory."

two dreams, unrelated, ?

did i bite off more than i can chew?

can i do this?

did i do something wrong?

is this tree i'm barking up not my own?

... all these things percolate overnight and i dream of my computer filled with water; a heavy dew has fallen in the student union where i left it overnight. Dr. ______ is somewhere in the dreamscape, but i do not know where. i pour the water out, hoping it will turn back on, waiting for it to dry.

it all seems so logical and frightening

and segues into a dream of the theater. ropes run through head blocks and come undone from arbors. the curtain hovers overhead as try to retie the knot...

theory v. praxis

in spite of this afternoon's escapades, i still believe in the conceptual viability of tamari/mirin pumpkin seeds. unfortunately, the stickily sweet glob drying in the kitchen tells a different story, and - besides their distressing, distinctive lack of tamari-ness - my cooking them stove top also led to the inclusion of olive oil, which i now realize was applied in excess. rather than viewing it as a failed experiment, however, i prefer to think of it as an illustration of the gap between theory and praxis. but this is beside the point.

the point is that my yin and i leave for North Carolina in a few days, and last night we entered into a conversation regarding Cao Guimarães' maddening masterpiece nanofania. we encountered the piece at the midpoint of our Art Basel excursion, and if not for my attempt to (self-)medicate a wicked headache with Coca-Cola, we may have passed it by without giving it the time and attention it deserved.

fortunately, the botanical garden (and its outbuilding) next to the convention center had been overrun (like the rest of Miami) by the Swiss art behemoth, and one room - empty and dark - made it the perfect choice for my convalescing. inside,

(i listened:)

to most composition systems,

(languages, codes, etc.),

there is an internal logic,
cohesion and coherence.
the piece

(a filmic score)

breaks those ties.
for example,
the image of a bubble bursting

()

has no relation to the sound

(volume, pitch, etc.)

of a toy piano -
other than that determined by the composer.
furthermore,
a different note on that same piano

(found noise, etc.)

need not relate to the first sound.
the composition is thus freed from the bounds

(and limitations)

of its notation system.

apparently,

this time last year i was
procrastinating
and writing
things
like:

Memories
(Dia de playa)

I saw a glimpse of heaven
up the skirt of a second story balcony,

but it was only a memory:

a Polaroid couple at the shore, the hand
of a photographer left alone.

Romance dies; art
inevitably follows.

We stood in front of a mirror pocked and punctured,
watching our reflection deteriorate and
give way to what lie ahead.

We took a picture, like
the old man fifty years before, so
we would have something to hold onto.

[lapse]

I didn't cry until the next
morning, when I began
putting it down on
paper, and began
letting go; the
art we were
becoming
the art
this
is.

Dia de playa, a photograph by Patricio Reig

oops(?) i did it again

somehow, midnight is nigh; i have written myself halfway into a story whose exposition, exegesis, and elocution have grown increasingly murky. i find myself looking for climaxes under rocks, and chipping away at pebbles of sand with icicles.

in how many languages might one prevaricate?

(un, deux, trois...)

yesterday there was a pornographic platypus in Miami, and i found myself sore-footed and transit-less, trying to survey acres of art between bouts of rain and headache. there was a malice in the clouds, and we waited for the weather to break in the shadow of a run-down Days Inn while passers-by shucked and jived in innumerable languages. between the German and French and Spanish and Portuguese, one could hear the building moan as the winds came ashore, whispering of 1972 and the days before high-rise cocaine couture invaded South Beach...

words are nothing

more than tangents

splayed into oblivion.

NO LOITERING

the start of the week, i found myself in a conversation about gentrification, and one of the side effects was an interrogation of loitering. i thought about stoops and sidewalks and the laundromat across the street from my apartment. i considered the underlying logic of a law designed to prevent people from congregating without purpose.

who defines purpose?

as far i can reckon, the "NO LOITERING" sign takes - as a starting point - that the natural state for a person is to be either:

1) in one's own box
2) in someone else's box
3) in transit between boxes

it sounds strange stated this way, but it also appears necessary. loitering as criminal endeavor can only seem commonsensical to a society that embraces (implicitly) the notion of an underlying deviancy to open spaces and social gatherings motivated by purposes other than commerce.

that being said, we could learn a lot from Peter:

in the thrall of Walter Benjamin

earlier today i finished an epic examination of Heath Ledger and The Dark Knight, running the gamut from Jack to Kahlil and back again to the feet of the maestro. it was like staring at a mirror hung askew;

i felt the weight of my gaze turned back upon me.

i typed, shivering, the final sentence:

"... and as the spectacle of Ledger's passing continues to fade, what emerges is the image of Janus - one face gazing backwards, tracing a boundary between Ledger and ourselves; and the other looking forward, seeking absolution in his lingering presence."

where this leads i do not know, but i managed (for the first time) to string together a single, coherent, compelling line of thought over the course of six thousand words. no fancy tricks, no repetition, no escapes into formalism. one of my goals, of course, is to see it published, but my truest impulse was simply say what i meant, to say simply that which is not.

Spike Lee, gentrification, and the importance of words

two students stayed after their final exam yesterday, and a colleague and i spent 45 minutes talking to them about Spike Lee, gentrification, and the importance of writing down the words you encounter but do not know.

Part 1: Spike Lee

i remember seeing Do the Right Thing when i was about 13 or so. i knew it was good, but it didn't feel good, and i didn't understand the ending. or why i felt like the good guy and the bad guy. or even which one was which.

i didn't have the words for it at the time, but the film captured the emotional complexity of race in America unlike anything i had ever seen or heard. it couldn't be taught, it couldn't be spoken - it could only be felt in the moments when the pizza parlor burned and heard on the sidewalk on the morning after...


Part 2: gentrification

i moved to Washington Heights in August 1999, and i jokingly referred to myself (even back then) as poised on the spear tip of gentrification. the 90's were a good decade for my vocabulary, and i moved to Manhattan with a pocket full of fifty cent words to describe the way i felt. i pointed my entire purpose and being at ridding myself of the parts of me that were not my own, and page after page filled in composition pads as i took the long A Train ride from 181st to Columbus Circle...


Part 3: the importance of words

eventually i learned that i would never rid myself of the parts of me that were not my own because there is nothing that is not my own. i learned that all those fifty cent words were bankrupt, that they could never confine or describe the extent of my being.

all the racism, all the sexism, all the consumption - i claim them all. i accept the inevitability of our divinity and marvel at the extent of our hubris. i still write down the words i encounter, but do not know...